Song

Love Will Tear Us Apart

Joy Division

Album:

Song Meaning of Love Will Year Us Apart by Joy Division

The zenith of Joy Division's gloomy Mancunian post-punk vision still pricks you in the heart like an ice pick.

Singer Ian Curtis, who was distraught over his failing marriage and epilepsy, actually came up with the song's title as a sardonic parody of Captain and Tenille's 1975 hit single "Love Will Keep Us Together."

In a suitably eerie move, he even recorded it in the same studio. Guitarist Bernard Sumner observed that Ian's influence "seemed to be madness and insanity."

The fact that the song was Joy Division's final single and was released weeks after Curtis died by suicide makes the song's eerie chorus all the more moving.

At a Joy Division gig in October 1979, Curtis met Belgian music journalist and music promoter Annik Honoré and the two began a relationship, which caused further distress between Curtis and Woodruff.

Speaking about her relationship with Curtis, Honoré stated in a 2010 interview with Belgian magazine supplement Focus:

‘It was a completely pure and platonic relationship, very childish, very chaste… I did not have a sexual relationship with Ian. He was on medication, which rendered it a nonphysical relationship. I am so fed up that people question my word or his. People can say whatever they want, but I am the only person to have his letters… One of his letters says that the relationship with his wife Deborah had already finished prior to us meeting each other.’

Love Will Tear Us Apart lyrics by Joy Division

[When routine bites hard,

And ambitions are low,

And resentment rides high,

But emotions won't grow,

And we're changing our ways,

Taking different roads.

Then love, love will tear us apart again.

Love, love will tear us apart again.

Why is the bedroom so cold?

You've turned away on your side.

Is my timing that flawed?